“The Alden proposal grossly undervalues Lee and fails to recognize the strength of our business today, as the fastest-growing digital subscription platform in local media, and our compelling future prospects,” Lee Chairman Mary Junck said.

“We remain confident in our ability to create significant value as an independent company,” she added.

Lee’s board unanimously rejected Alden’s proposal, the company said on the same day it reported a $5.3 million fiscal fourth-quarter profit. The profit is a stark increase from its $1.3 million loss a year ago—coupled with a 65 percent increase of digital-only subscribers to 402,000.

Alden, one of the largest newspaper owners in the country, has stood out for its steep cost cuts and layoffs. Meanwhile, Lee owns dozens of newspapers, among them the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Buffalo News. Unions from the Lee newspapers encouraged the company’s board of directors in a letter on Nov. 29 to resist Alden’s offers.

“They are not good stewards of their investments. They do not try to run a sustainable news company. They will not turn profits by growing the business and increasing revenue. They will do so by gutting newsrooms,” the letter read.

The Omaha World-Herald’s union, which described Alden as “the assassin of local news” in a tweet late last month, thanked the board on Twitter Thursday for rejecting the offer but warned that it doesn’t necessarily put an end to Alden’s advances.

“We must remain vigilant — this offer won’t be the assassin’s last. Alden not only grossly undervalues journalism, it grossly undermines it,” the Omaha World-Herald Guild wrote.

Ken Doctor, a longtime media analyst who now runs a local online journalism startup called Lookout Santa Cruz in California, said Alden isn’t likely to abandon its bid to acquire Lee because it believes it can extract profits from the company with the model it has used elsewhere that calls for selling off the real estate the chain owns and drastically cutting costs.

“What Alden has done—and it’s now pretty proven community to community—it’s harvesting the last profits out of the newspaper business and it is doing that unapologetically,” Doctor said.

Alden said last month when it made its offer that it already owned more than 6 percent of Lee’s stock. The New York-based hedge fund didn’t immediately respond to Lee Thursday.

Even if Lee succeeds at turning away Alden, it will likely face pressure to sell itself to someone else in the next couple of years or find a suitor willing to take the company private.

In that regard, Lee might be able to get assistance from its biggest financier, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, which has held Lee’s $483 million in debt since Berkshire decided to sell its newspaper chain to Lee in 2020. At the time, Buffett praised Lee as the best steward for its papers. Buffett did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

The newspaper industry has been struggling with shrinking revenue as it transitions to digital publication, and the pandemic only intensified those stresses. Pew Research has estimated that nearly half of all newsroom jobs were eliminated between 2004 and 2018 as newspapers consolidated or closed. About one-fourth of the country’s newspapers have closed in the past 15 years, according to research from the University of North Carolina.

But earlier this week, Lee received support from its second-largest shareholder, Praetorian Capital, which holds 7.3 percent of Lee’s stock. Investment manager Harris Kupperman said in a letter to Lee’s board Wednesday that he believes the company’s stock is worth at least $100 apiece — well above Alden’s opportunistic offer.

“The only reason that the shares trade where they do, is that investors have yet to realize that while the traditional print newspaper business slowly declines, the digital business has been growing rapidly, becoming an increasingly substantial percentage of the total business,” Kupperman wrote.

After Alden made its unsolicited bid, Lee adopted a “poison-pill” plan that would make it more expensive for Alden to buy up Lee’s shares once it owns more than 10 percent of the company. Lee also rebuffed Alden’s attempt to nominate three new directors to the company’s board.

If Alden does acquire 10 percent of the shares, the shareholder rights plan that the Davenport, Iowa-based company adopted would allow its other shareholders to buy shares at a 50 percent discount at that point or possibly get free shares for every share they already own.

Alden has scooped up newspapers across the country through a series of acquisitions in recent years, including the purchase of Tribune’s papers earlier this year. Alden also owns the Denver Post, Orange County Register and Boston Herald.

Lee’s stock was up nearly 12 percent at $27.90 Thursday afternoon.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.